cashew | Wednesday, July 10th, 2024

Locked in a room that can only open after sex trope. Emotional torture porn.

Pros:

Jing Yuan tops!
Biologically male bottom!Dan Feng!
Gentle emotional sex!
Emotionally torturing Jing Yuan for the entire PWP!
Talking awkwardly about feels and still not being able to resolve anything because they'll just forget about everything as soon as they leave the room!
Self-sacrificing Jing Yuan's biggest concern is making Dan Feng comfortable (both physically and emotionally)!
Dan Feng has no fucking clue what happens in the future but can tell Jing Yuan is suffering. Maaaaangst.
Metioning Jing Yuan's 300-years long military campaign backstory during the 721 year time gap. (I cannot find English references to this, so here in this Chinese article, screencaps show 青镞 explaining that Jing Yuan had to leave Mimi behind for 300 years after being sent out on a military campaign and, when he came back, an aged Mimi walked up to him and died in his arms. 〒▽〒 WTF miHoyo, what's your problem?! — But also, 300 YEAR MILITARY CAMPAIGN. So much angst!)

Cons:

References to Jing Yuan being a kid during Quintet era... boo.

I...I like this fic. I can even forgive the minor drawbacks because holy shit, I love this emotional torture porn. Of course, the super tragic aspect is that despite the feelings being returned, all of this is will just get re-set back to the status quo, so no actual progression of the relationship.

Was it worth digging through literal hundreds of crappy fic for this? Um... I don't know but this fic makes me happy.

A slight follow up to the Mimi backstory: Since there's canon confirmation that Jing Yuan was leading a military campaign that lasted 300 years as the general, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that the Cloud Knights are actually kept pretty busy. If they're not defending themselves, then they're out there pre-emptively fighting something. So my headcanon persists that the "peaceful" years Luofu experienced is not "no active military campaigns" so much as "no invasions from enemies", but the Cloud Knights are engaged in a prolonged external war to keep the enemies at bay and too busy to organize an invasion of Luofu.

In other words, the Cloud Knights have been fighting this whole time. It's just the fighting was moved off of Luofu rather than taking place on Luofu while Jing Yuan was the general. It also makes more sense for the Xianzhou people to be in a relatively constant state of war, because why the hell else would they maintain such expensive war machines if they didn't have constant on-going military operations? Given the immensely high militarization of Luofu, it's hard to imagine they've been living "in peace". Also, I've noticed the Chinese descriptions actually never used "peace" to describe Luofu under Jing Yuan's leadership. They used things like "prosperity", "supremacy", or "stability".